Alvaro Moreira breaks down the best methods for making and animating coffee bubbles in his video tutorial series

To help you out, I've included some tutorial assets which can be downloaded from here.

This is a tutorial on how to create coffee bubbles which morph into a logo. First of all we'll create the bubbles using a Birth Texture operator, so we can control the particle's position and size based on a grayscale map. Then, using a black-and-white image of your logo, we'll animate the particles using a Data Test.

Last but not least, I'll show you how to mesh the particles and create a tension between the coffee and bubbles using Frost.

Creating bubbles

In this first part we'll create the bubbles using a Birth Texture operator, so we can control the particle's position and size based on a grayscale map. This grayscale is a procedural map. It's created using a Radial Gradient Ramp and a noise map.

Create the bubbles using a grayscale map

Animating bubbles

With a Data Test and a black-and-white image, we'll keep the desired particles in one event and send the others to another event. Next we'll create some animation in order to make some of them draw, others to pop and the logo ones to stay there wobbling a little bit.

Animate the bubbles using a Data Test

Bubble mesh

The bubbles look better and render faster when they're meshed, so we'll create it using Frost's Union of Sphere's meshing. Then we'll generate a liquid tension between the coffee and the bubbles in order to give that classic liquid deformation.

Generate the mesh using Frost

The skull logo created with coffee bubbles

Related links

Check out Alvaro Moreira's official website
Alvaro Moreira also has a Vimeo account
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Readers Comments (Newest on Top)

(ID: 281301, pid: 0) Alvaro Moreira on Mon, 16 June 2014 8:51pm Hey Steffen, you can get the Data Test in 3ds Max 2013 subscription or 2014 and 2015. If you're using max 2010 you can donwload it as a plugin at orbaz.com.
Alvaro

(ID: 280150, pid: 0) Steffen on Tue, 10 June 2014 11:37am Hi, great stuff :)
I've had to stop when you start using "Data Test" in the Particle View, i dont have it in my 3ds max 2010. Is there a way to get it?